I am deeply saddened to learn of the news of the death of my friend Greg Lastowka, a professor at Rutgers-Camden School of Law. Greg was a pioneer in studying virtual worlds and video games, and his work forms a good part of the foundation in that field. His work had that wonderful quality of […]

The Eleventh Circuit released its 129-page opinion in Cambridge University Press v. Patton (which most of us probably still think of as the Becker case) last Friday. Although the appeals court reversed what I thought was a pretty solid opinion of the district court upholding Georgia State University’s practice of distributing digital “course packs” of reading […]

I’ll be back in Brooklyn on Thursday, to take part in a fantastic NYC Legal Hackers session on revenge porn. I’m excited to hear from and learn from Lee Rowland, Mark Jaffe, and Ari Waldman. And, I’m really grateful to Phil Weiss, Jonathan Askin, David Giller, and the brilliant Legal Hackers team for this event. […]

The New York Times has an interesting article on attempts to use law to combat revenge porn. It quotes a series of experts, including Danielle Citron, Mary Anne Franks, Eric Goldman, Eugene Volokh, Charlotte Laws, and Marc Randazza. (Danielle has an excellent new book out on the topic, which I recommend. Disclosure: she kindly asked […]

James Grimmelmann and David Post have responses to Orwell’s Armchair up at the University of Chicago Law Review’s Dialogue site. I’m grateful and flattered to have them as partners in the discussion, and I am very excited to read their articles!

The Center for Individual Freedom has just published a paper by three RIAA lawyers that purports to develop a natural rights theory and history of copyright. The paper is short (6 pages long), which appears to be its only valuable quality. I’ll set out a brief critique below, but first I want to note that […]

I talked with Lifehacker’s IP guru Adam Dachis about the closure of several Usenet indexing services, including NZBMatrix. NZBMatrix threw in the towel after coming under twin pressures: a flood of DMCA notices related to links pointing to allegedly infringing content, and difficulty navigating the requirements of service providers such as PayPal. It’s the latest […]

When I teach Internet Law, I joke that banning child pornography is straightforward since there isn’t a pro-kid porn lobby (unlike, say, banning copyright infringement or adult pornography). I stand corrected: Rick Falvinge, founder of Sweden’s Pirate Party, has taken up the pro-legalization cause. (Interesting choice as a policy focus, but to each their own.) […]

I have a new essay up on SSRN, titled Censorship v3.1. It’s under consideration by the peer-reviewed journal IEEE Internet Computing. Here’s the abstract: Internet censorship has evolved. In Version 1.0, censorship was impossible; in Version 2.0, it was a characteristic of repressive regimes; and in Version 3.0, it spread to democracies who desired to […]